Films to stream

From the sleaziest and most self-regarding hacks to the noblest crusaders for the truth, newspaper reporters have figured large as protagonists in Hollywood cinema. Here are five of the best films about them:

His Girl Friday In Howard Hawks’s celebrated screwball comedy from 1940, a cynical newspaper editor (Cary Grant) needs his ex-wife (Rosalind Russell), an ace reporter, to cover the story of a man on death row – but she’s due to retire that day and marry another man.

Ace in the Hole Kirk Douglas stars in Billy Wilder’s 1951 film about a failing reporter in backwoods New Mexico. When a local man is trapped by a rockfall, he sees a potential scoop, and manipulates everyone from the victim’s wife to a corrupt sheriff to turn the story into a national sensation.

All the President’s Men Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford play Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward in this 1976 account of how The Washington Post’s investigation of the Watergate office break-in led to the resignation of President Nixon. It’s among the most accurately observed fiction films about working journalists.

Salvador Released in 1986, Oliver Stone’s early film is one of his best. James Woods stars as a drug-addled, unemployed reporter who spies a good story in El Salvador and ends up – together with a spaced-out DJ friend (Jim Belushi) – way out of his depth in the deeply troubled country.

Spotlight Starring Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton and others, this low-key but gripping 2015 film charts the painstaking, Pulitzer Prizewinning efforts of the Boston Globe team who, in 2002, exposed clerical abuse in the Boston archdiocese and the systemic cover-up that had allowed it to flourish.